That Was Funny The First 100 Times
What was the turnaround time between everyone marveling at newfangled email technologies and then complaining about the whole thing? Not very long, I don't think. And the same definitely applies to viral videos. At first YouTube was this great, vast landscape of 3-minute-long time wasters that were good for a chuckle and a "look what I found!" self-satisfied email to friends. Now? The minute you hear that term, "viral video," it makes you think of something grainy and shaky-camera'd, made by some festering nerd who would probably harrass you endlessly if you double-crossed him. People are too savvy with the internet at this point to still be enchanted by its simple, chintzy magicks. YouTube is used more practically now, it's more functional—and those dancing, lightsaber-waving fat kids have been reduced to mostly-forgotten Coney Island freakshow diversions.

Let's Get Cynical, Cynical
As is the case with most phenomena, corporate interests were pretty quick to pick up the scent and glom on to viralness for their own nefarious gains. The idea of a viral ad campaign must have seemed pretty hip and edgy when the first smartass marketing kid pitched it at some meeting, but it quickly became irksome and frustrating and just too damn much. That Russian guy trashing his office? Fake. The cellphone popcorn thing? Fake. Heck, even "Will It Blend" is, actually, advertising a blender. It's gotten to the point that people don't trust videos to be anything but viral marketing for something, to paraphrase our cynical initial reaction to the Montauk Monster photo. The marketing companies overplayed their hands on this one, taking what could have been occasionally fun extra components to more mainstream ad campaigns and just overdoing it to death. Like so much else in this developing world. (Remember when people actually opened spam mail? OK, maybe that never actually happened).

Turn On the TV, I Mean the Computer
People watch a lot of TV on the computer. I mean, not a ton. Not enough to ruin broadcast television (yet). But, like, people watch Hulu and things on iTunes and various networks' websites, and that stuff is much better produced than, like, that YouTube video where that one dude falls down. Virals were a distraction from other stuff on the computer, and now virals have just become that stuff on the computer. So what distracts us from that? Television! On, um, the computer. This may be more crackpot theory than tested technoanthropology, but it stands to reason that the slicker (and freer) real filmed internet content gets, the less relevance and urgency the amateur stuff will have.

This is not to say that people aren't watching viral videos. I mean, YouTube is totally super popular and there are still funny WTF videos on the onlines. But lately I've noticed that it's like bizarro foreign commercials and things of that ilk. The garage-made YouTube sensation may be a thing of the distant, two-year-old past.

Can't say I'm sad to see it go.

And why is their level of discourse so much calmer and smarter than Western blog comments?

“Those overpowering Satan’s seduction are few, and we sacrifice those few since they may win us Paradise,” read a posting on both sites this summer on the subject of “vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.” It continued: “Yet, keeping them alive is beneficial for us, since every one of them is tantamount to an entire people. So we must find a way to save those lives and harness that zeal.”

The post led to a vast and heated online discussion among extremists, illustrating the new complexity of the topic. As the jihadists on these sites move from discussing ideology to the practical aspects, it becomes clear that their biggest technological challenge will be moving on from the radio-wave technology that has proved highly successful in remotely setting off homemade bombs against military convoys in Iraq to the more delicate task of getting the explosive to its target and then detonating it without being exposed.

See, Western blog commenters would move from discussing ideology to discussing, like how other commenters are racist Rethuglicans and how much they love Tyra and how Ekhlaas sucks so much compared to Firdaws recently, don't you think? The new guy sucks, bring back Abu Abdullah al-Qurashi!

Sure, Al7orya doesn't sound as funny as 4Chan, and they're debating how best to blow people like us up, but why are they all so much more polite about it?

Living to Bomb Another Day [NYT]

"Have you or anyone you know had their life ruined because of the internet? Have something with blogs, myspace, facebook affected your entire life in a negative way? We want to hear your stories ASAP," the casting call pries. Yay! Now you can ruin your life all over again, in front of a larger audience! Here's hoping our dear old friend John Fitzgerald Page makes an appearance. Full casting notice is below.

[RealityWanted via Maura]

Here are the two interpretations of The Huffington Post that Arianna and company would like you to forget: "left-wing Drudge Report" and "unedited celebrity Livejournal." The increasingly bloated HuffPo still is mostly an unhealthy mixture of those two things, of course, but their ambitions are higher. They have to be, to justify that ridiculous internal valuation. Hence HuffPo Chicago! And, more importantly, HuffPo Living, full of bullshit local-news quality health stories, "how to beat workplace stress" listicles (or often worse: links to those listicles posted elsewhere), alternative medicine quack-bloggers, and other "grab the apolitical old women" content. (To be fair, this shit does fit in well with Arianna's moony guru-filled California lifestyle, just as the media and political sections compliment her strident populism and personal hatred of the establishment press.)

And with entertainment and style sections, HuffPo now calls itself "The Internet Newspaper." Real newspapers across the nation spiral into bankruptcy, but HuffPo's overhead costs are much lower, what with not paying most of their contributors. And also what with not having any original reporting.

The site is still another damn aggregator, curating and linking real work done by traditional newsgatherers. With insane raving commenters, of course. And "blogs" from Nora Ephron. [Three years later and they still call each "post" a "blog." This still drives us insane.] This is the point L.A. Times media writer James Rainey makes in his slightly bitter piece on Arianna and the site. "I confess I'm as charmed and amused by the beguiling Ms. H as anyone," he says, "but also slightly queasy about whether her Huffington Post will ever offer original content and reporting that lives up to the hype and pretty packaging." What, you're not happy with featured content like "One Millenial Speaks Out: Why I'm Enrolling in Culinary School"? [Ed. note: we wuz wrong.]

But, you know, they're still working on that whole original content that will make their site actually worth what they'd like to cash out thing!

Another infusion of capital, $10 million to $20 million, is in the works, Huffington said Tuesday, to hire more reporters and editors and upgrade the site's technology. She would like to beef up political and media coverage and put at least one reporter in each of two dozen cities by the end of 2009.

Yes of course.

Still. How does the "HuffPo, even if it's not worth $200 million, is still a hot commodity that you should buy for a lot of money" story keep afloat? How the hell did that $200 million number get traction in the first place? Ken Lerer, the quiet, New York-based co-founder and Chairman, certainly helps. He's got business acumen and influence, yes, but the guy also founded a PR firm once upon a time. Nina Monk's Fools Rush In, her history of AOL/Time Warner, illustrates Lerer's ability to work "with" the press:

Hah. That's the co-founder of that strident defender of media independence and transparency the Huffington Post reveling in how well he tricked the media into loving a white-collar criminal.

Slate, this is the kind of idea we get at like 4:30 p.m. on a Friday and we think better of before we even finish the email pitch to Blakeley. This is apparently the kind of idea you decide to publish as an actual book so our advice is probably falling on deaf ears.

“We are trying to push free speech,” she said, while acknowledging that the ads would still have to conform to the cable companies’ restrictions on content. “I’ll put out the cacophony, and the cream will rise to the top.”

Oh, chief executive. Is this your first trip to the internet? If by "cream" you mean "lip-syncing girls in short shorts" than yes, sure, it'll rise above the cacophony. But they're not encouraging that sort of thing—they're courting political bloggers. First up, a group of activists are raising the funds necessary to air an ad accusing the media of not talking enough about how John McCain cheated on his first wife. Finally, publicity whore political activists have a soapbox!

"A top Russian diplomat accused foreign media on Sunday of pro-Georgian bias in their coverage of the ongoing conflict.

"Russia says Georgian forces have killed around 2,000 South Ossetian civilians, mainly Russian nationals, since the start of the offensive, and that 34,000 locals have been forced to flee to Russia. In response to the Georgian attacks, Russia sent tanks and troops into the province, and carried out a series of air strikes on Georgian military targets." [en.rian.ru]

Incidentally, the site's branding was outed by Tina's friend, octogenarian gossip columnist Liz Smith. Having been burned by the backlash against Talk magazine—the glossy backed by Harvey Weinstein which Tina Brown launched with massive hype and one of the most lavish parties in magazine history—Manhattan's "queen of buzz" has been more discreet in the preparation of her first web venture. One assumes that Liz Smith forgot the sneak peek of the website was supposed to be for her eyes only—though Tina Brown can hardly complain about Smith's discretion, having pressured the ancient New York Post gossip writer to come out as a lesbian for an early issue of Talk.

No doubt The Daily Beast will invite comparisons to the newspaper of Waugh's novel; already Liz Smith compares the IAC mogul backing Tina Brown to a character in Scoop, proprietor Lord Copper; and there will be easy jokes to make whenever Brown's news site makes an error or hypes a story.

But I was reminded more of the scene in Scoop in which the hapless hero goes on an extravagant shopping trip before heading to Africa to cover the war, buying six linen suits, surgical instruments and a portable humidor. Waugh, himself a foreign correspondent during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, once said: "There are few pleasures more complete, or to me more rare, than that of shopping extravagantly at someone else's expense."

That quote could serve as a statement of editorial principles for the notoriously profligate Tina Brown, who happily doubled writers' contracts to lure them to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. The Daily Beast has already run through a series of expensive design consultants and employs about half-a-dozen staff its office in IAC's Gehry-designed office palace. During her magazine career, Tina Brown shopped at the expense of Conde Nast's Si Newhouse; reinvented as an internet entrepreneur backed by Barry Diller, she's still spending other people's money.

The story is still sneaking in through the cracks. McClatchy ran a "why isn't Edwards answering our questions" piece that will set the tone for future MSM stories on this terrible subject. Leno and Conan have mentioned the story too, which definitely suggests that the era when no one would've known about this unless the Times picked it up is finally over.

But now it is the internet's time to shine! Slate's done great by the story, with cranky Mickey Kaus justifying his insane anti-MSM crusade and Jack Shafer being his usual cantankerous and inarguably correct self. And hey, it's been good for Gawker too—nothing helps beat the August doldrums like a sex scandal that also allows for excoriation of Olde Media.

Of course, not everyone on the internet has performed so honorably. It's bannable to mention the story at liberal blog powerhouse DailyKos, the HuffPo is still mostly quiet on it, and the Wikipedia edit war is staggering into its second contentious week.

But now we have photos! Once there are pictures, the story is ready for television. If the Edwards love child was the Montauk Monster, CNN would've been all over it last week! And once the story is on television, the newspapers can finally go back and write about it, even if it's just a meta-media "oh dear what happened to the press on this one" kind of story.

John himself has played this stupidly, running from reporters and hoping they'll maintain their vow of silence as long as he keeps his mouth shut. They will, John, because they love your wife, but they can only justify this to themselves for so long.

Because, as you can see above, the photo is damning and ready-made for distribution on the internet or cable television.

Bob Pittman's claims to have founded MTV were overstated, but he was closely associated with the cable music channel's gigantic success in the 1980s. It was said of his wife Sandy, who later attempted to conquer Everest, that she gave a new meaning to the term "social climber." And Pittman himself was equally ambitious on the Manhattan circuit, though he scaled the social and business heights with a good deal of charm and grace.

The one-eyed mogul, now 54 years old, came tumbling down after he took over management of revenue-inflating AOL during the bubble. The online access service cashed in on the funds being invested in late 1990s dotcoms, much of which was spent on advertising partnerships which gave the startup brands a place on AOL pages.

The Dulles-based online service was never going to survive unscathed a downturn and the erosion of the dial-up market, and Pittman's reputation would have suffered anyway. But the infamous 2000 merger between AOL and media giant Time Warner ensured he would not merely be despised by investors who bought into AOL at its revenue-inflated peak; he personified to Time Warner veterans the arrogance and empty rhetoric of the AOL upstarts. Pittman managed to sell $94m in stock in the aftermath of the merger, but the dilution of Time Warner shareholders ensured the hatred of a large part of Manhattan's media establishment.

Pittman's contribution to Daily Candy has been more constructive. His salesmanship transformed Dany Levy's cute little newsletter into a marketing machine for fashion and retail brands. Pittman's reputation as a canny internet investor is made by this transaction, by some measure the best return of his fund. To be sure, the web may eclipse email as the preferred online medium for advertisers, and Comcast may have bought a property that's past its peak. But the cable company's bosses are in Philadelphia, a city that Pittman can easily avoid. In terms of Manhattan media, the former wonderboy is back.

The Southern Poverty Law Center noticed, in a magazine piece about Emilia and her work with the school, this innocuous-looking line: "For more information about Glades Academy, call Chloe Black." That name probably doesn't mean much to you, but it's very familiar to a group like the SPLC, which battles racist organizations.

Chloe Black used to be married to David Duke. Former national leader of the KKK David Duke. Straight-up neo-Nazi David Duke.

While less visible in the white supremacist world than either of her husbands, Black has a strong movement history of her own. She met Duke at a college meeting of the White Youth Alliance in the 1970s, and, after marrying him, became vice president of his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. She long held the copyright to African Atto, a weird 1973 booklet that instructs blacks on how to kill whites — and which was written, as was revealed by enterprising reporters, by Duke, who then claimed he was using it to compile a list of “radical blacks.”

Yes but that was years ago, you say! People change! Sure. Her next husband was Don Black. Another former Klan leader! But far, far more famous these days for founding and operating the most notoriously hateful site on the internet: Stormfront. Look it up yourself if you don't know the deal—it's generally considered poor Internet form to mention it, let alone link. It's basically a neo-Nazi message board. Fucked up shit goes on there.

Don Black claims to be unemployed, though he pays to operate Stormfront all on his own in a house owned entirely by his wife Chloe. And where does Chloe get her cash? From Emilia Fanjul, the Cuban-American sugar magnate socialite! Black is an executive assistant at Florida Crystals, the Fanjuls' sugar conglomerate. They had no comment.

They maybe didn't even know! Though a GOOGLE SEARCH would've revealed that in recent years Chloe Black has attended the conferences of hate groups and says lovely things about David Duke to the press.

So yes a neo-Nazi is flacking for a school designed to help poor minority children out of poverty, and using the money she makes to run a site dedicated to raising hatred and inciting violence against those little kids. And a wealthy socialite is involved!

WTF.

[Photo of Emilia Fanjul: New York Social Diary]

Step 1: It's Offensive! Liberals Say He's wearing a turban and they're burning a flag and Osama bin Laden is hanging on the wall! The New Yorker says Barack Obama is a terrorist who hates America!
We Say OMG shut up.
Obama's spokesman says: "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."
We Say They "may think" they meant it satirically? Does intention no longer enter into it? "Most readers" will think it's offensive? Most New Yorker readers? What are you even talking about.
Media Elite Says "Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal — no matter how superior they feel their intellect is — should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing."
We Say Way to both call out the elite for being snobs while also calling everyone else in America a moron you twit.
Conservatives Say Ha ha... ha?

Step 2: It's Bad Satire! Well-meaning Liberals Say The New Yorker should've added a little a caption that says "this is a joke!" and then no one would get confused.
We Say Seriously?
They Continue Or maybe a little cartoon John McCain who's thinking all this crazy stuff! Then this cartoon would be ideologically acceptable.
We Say Yes, good work, how is that Two-and-a-Half Men spec script coming, Mr. Funny Guy? Oh and maybe cartoon McCain should be complaining about how much money things cost these days, because he is so old? (THAT IS SATIRE BY THE WAY)

Step 3: Think Of the Children! Media Critics Say Americans are too stupid to recognize that this is satire.
We Say So far all the people mischaracterizing the cover have been members of the esteemed east coast media elite. Many of them are on television! The little old lady from Dubuque has been invoked but not heard from. She probably either already believes the bullshit about Obama or she doesn't. It's not clear why a cartoon on the cover of a magazine would sway her more than emails she's probably already received. Because Americans believe cartoons are real?
Bloggers Say The New Yorker didn't help Obama, so they're dumb, because they're liberal, and as liberals everything they do should help Obama. Like Rolling Stone.
We Say It should be the job of the newsmedia to tell the truth, yes. And The New Yorker does that (presumably) in their well-reported cover story on Obama. But The New Yorker, while a liberal publication, is not the house organ of the Democratic party, or an Obama surrogate, and in fact they are in an independent magazine beholden to no one but their subscribers and readers, who hopefully understand the magazine's tone and style, which, yes, involves making funny jokes sometimes. And Jonathan Alter should, if he wishes to, explain and debunk all the various gross myths about Obama. That is a good thing for a Newsweek columnist to do. But it's actually the job of the Obama campaign to make sure voters hear the truth about their candidate.
Furthermore We Say Whether this cover helps or hurts Obama is utterly irrelevant. Because it's not a piece of campaign propaganda. And for liberals to treat the magazine like it should be Pravda is gross.

Step 4: Lighten Up! Suddenly Commentators Say: The Obama campaign should get a sense of humor!
We Say (and Jason Zengerle concurs) Where were you guys yesterday? Also yes there's no reason the Obama campaign needed to say they thought it was hilarious, though "offensive" was a bit much.

Step 5: Howard Kurtz Howard Kurtz Says Blah blah blah I'm utterly useless.
We Say Oh god we never want to write about this again.

Back when Calacanis' Weblogs Inc was competing for traffic and attention with Gawker Media, Jason basically led to the creation of Gawker Comments. Our publisher, Nick Denton, never cared for comments. Too much noise. Too many amateurs. Spam. But Calacanis' Engadget had comments, and they helped that site's traffic. "A blog is not a blog without comments," Jason used to say. Now, though?

Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them? Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that "open is better!" Open is not better. Running a blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall, and then seconds after their performance you run to the back Alley and grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask them what they think of the performance they overheard in the Alley. They then take a piss on the stage and say "F-you" to the people who just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That's openness for you... my how far we've come! We've put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.

Hah. An about-face! Look what YOU ANIMALS did to him! Jason Calacanis is gone off the net, like so many others before him, because commenters are mean. And also homeless and drunk. From the wisdom of crowds to, as Jason later says: "For the record, crowds are really frackin' stupid and to put your stock in crowds is about as bright as putting your faith in a dictator." Harsh! But definitely in tune with the current internet zeitgeist.

Because he's not the only one! Emily Gould shut off comments! Most Tumblrs are comment-free!

But the personal blog comment-retreat comes too late, as most professional outlets, like print magazines and newspapers, now allow comments everywhere. And they're nearly all terrible! Even when they're heavily moderated, as they are at the New York Times, the signal-to-noise ratio seems to get worse every day. What the hell is to be done? Some Gawker Media editors semi-regularly express their barely hidden desire to BAN EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU and go back to the glorious olde days of undemocratic blogging-as-broadcasting, not as conversation. We're sure that sentiment exists at every media outlet that currently hosts the unhinged rantings of conspiracists and cranks.

But the genie's out of the bottle. Commenters are here. And the internet does seem, these days, to belong to them. Treat her kindly. We'll just keep posting funny pictures for you to riff on.

Last night, Manhattan Borough President and proud parrot-owner Scott Stringer made a surprise visit to the Gawker Media inner sanctum. The perma-Upper West Sider, who is said to be eyeing a run at citywide office, confessed affection for Gawker and old sister site Wonkette. Interested in the machinations of new media, Stringer regaled us with tales of how it used to be: when he worked for future Congressman Jerry Nadler in the '80s, Nadler's press releases went to old media types not by phone or fax or smoke signal, but by Stringer himself, who used to ride the subways around town all day to hand-deliver the pages to the city's newsdesks.

Huh. So... he thinks he will be the next mayor? And, even more ludicrous, he thinks the support of Gawker will somehow help? (We have our suspicious as to which Dem campaign consultants recommended this little visit.)

paidContent was founded (in a STUDIO APARTMENT) by Rafat Ali, who still publishes and edits the site. Ali used to work for former Blog Mogul Jason Calacanis! Calacanis sold his Weblogs Inc (encompassing like 100 separate blogs [admittedly only a third of which were actually regularly updated]) to AOL back in the day for (A MEASLY) $25 million. Now Ali sells his four sites for even more money! Internet success story!

First and foremost, is the depth — and the quality — of Drudge's readership. Drudge's number of unique visitors is regularly touted but what is more important, in terms of his ability to drives news cycles, is that every reporter and editor who covers politics is checking the site multiple times a day.

Phil Singer, former deputy communications director for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign and now a Democratic consultant, called Drudge's "elite readership" a key to his influence. Singer added that a walk through any press filing center at a debate reveals every other laptop, at least, has Drudge's website up on its screen.

In other words, Drudge is still massively influential because all the reporters and editors who cal him influential still assume he's influential, so they refresh him every 20 seconds. See how that works? That's called "gatekeeping."

The funny thing is that if all of these people magically decided to switch their homepages to, say, the Huffington Post or Yahoo News (or maybe just a well-curated RSS feed!) tomorrow, the tenor of your "news" would change immeasurably but you would not be any less informed!

But everyone appointed Matt our "national political assignment editor" (to quote GOP op Kevin Madden) back in 1996 or something and they're all too lazy to find a different website. Even though Matt has definitely fallen off of late! He barely touched Reverend Wright at all, for instance, and that certainly didn't stop that story from dominating for two weeks.

Still, we love and admire the man, because nobody does anything like this better:
See, the stock market is collapsing. So here is a bear eating a fruit salad.

"19 years old, works part time, blogs daily, goes to school online. If she can do it, so can you. Have a life and earn a degree." Oh, where to begin.

What an inspiring young woman! How ever does she find the time to blog daily? Anyway, yes. Attending the University of Phoenix: it's just as legitimate as blogging!

(Also someone please photoshop Keith Gessen into this ad and replace "University of Phoenix" with "Harvard.")

University of Phoenix Allies Itself to Bloggers [AdRants]

"The phrase was born on May 24—two days after the film opened—and it went viral on movie message boards. In barely a month, it has blown through several Web. 2.0 benchmarks: YouTube tributes, 'fridge' haikus, merch-hawking Web sites, 'Word of the Day' status on UrbanDictionary.com. 'You're expecting [the movie] to be as great as you remembered it,' says Beth Russell, creator of nukingthefridge.com, 'and after the fridge scene, it was like, Oooo-K.' A new legend is born, for all the wrong reasons." [Newsweek]

Know the Sharing/Oversharing Divide. A bit of personal info—we have a kitty!—makes you a friend. Too much personal info—check out my facial!—makes you a target. This is not even a fine line. It is a very obvious line. It is the line that drove Julia Allison off the net before. Since her return, she, surprisingly, has not really crossed it!

Don't Write Like An Asshole. Kinda hard to quantify this one, right? Especially because some of us make our livings acting like pricks all day. But writing assholish things and writing like an asshole are different! Keith Gessen often Tumblrs like an asshole. Yes, you have a fine little magazine, but the I'll buy you a beer if you are half as impressive as me when you're my age thing is one of the douchiest things we've ever read, especially because dude is not actually Norman Mailer yet. Ditto for Lodwick's contention that his pretty websites "change the world." No, they don't! Maybe "asshole" just means "solipsist?" It does seem to, doesn't it. Which brings us to:

Manage Your Narcissism. Please. And:

Have a Sense of Humor Please.

STOP DIGGING. You're mocked or attacked. Respond with a cutting counter-attack, a reasonable and self-reflective defense, or DON'T RESPOND AT ALL. Or email the author and make friendly! This secret tactic usually works wonders. DON'T flail about helplessly in the comments section, where you'll be piled on. Don't post something hurt and whiny that reinforces whatever real or imagined fault you were attacked for. Bite back and enjoy the game or ignore it and move on with your life. Mr. Keith Gessen sort of did this, which is why we'll link to his cute puppy pictures.

Man Up. This advice is very sexist but also sadly useful.

Own Your Terrible Gimmick This is basically summed up as "fuck the haters." It means that when we (or anyone else!) do things like this to you, you do this.

Read This. Will Leitch is leaving the internet, but he imparted wisdom on his way to print.

Be Like Doree Everyone likes Doree. Everyone! Look at how she deflects criticism!

Don't Storm Off the Internet In a Huff. It's embarrassing. Also it makes the entire internet indistinguishable from LiveJournal, which is depressing.

We hope this helps all you Tumblrs and Tweeters out there! You whiny idiots!